This talk identifies a critical feature of late populism: popularism. Traditional populism operates through articulation: actively constructing “the people” as a political category by linking heterogeneous demands together against an elite or other. Popularism, alternatively, functions through refraction: it seeks maximum resonance with pre-existing popular attitudes and treats “the people” as an already-coherent homogenous group, simultaneously distorting the ones it claims to embody. While these modes of political practice diverge, they are two contradictory sides of the same political phenomena. The talk will explain what popularism is; why left and right populisms have increasingly converged on anti-immigrant and culturally conservative positions, and why popularism commits a fundamental error when it attempts to reflect popular common sense.
Mike McCarthy is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Community Studies here at UC Santa Cruz. At the center of his work is a focus on class and democracy. His first book Dismantling Solidarity: Capitalist Politics and American Pensions since the New Deal was published with Cornell University Press in 2017 and was awarded the Paul Sweezy Book Award as well as an honorable mention for the Labor and Labor Movements Book Award. His most recent book is The Master’s Tools: How Finance Wrecked Democracy (and a Radical Plan to Rebuild It), which was published by Verso Books in 2025. In addition to academic publishing, his work has been featured in Boston Review, The Guardian, Hammer & Hope, Jacobin, The New York Times, The New Left Review, and The Washington Post. He is currently writing about class and political identity.
Date | Time
February 4, 2026 | 12:15 PM – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public
Venue | Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz